02. January 2015

What hides in unused percentage of our brain

Below article is work in progress and it just reflects my mind when the idea that our brain is not unused but inactive. Please share any ideas/information below, that could help me finish this article and forward my thinking - I do read comments and they actually help me set stuff into my daily todo list.

I have asked myself a simple question: We are only using small amount of the brain, but why are we not using the other majority of it? As engineer I have of course asked myself how do they know we are only using the 12 % of brain and the answer was they were tracking the activity of our brain and areas which are active and by that volume they have calculated the amount of brain we use. That does not mean that other part of brain is unused but simply that it is not active.

Usage vs activity at microprocessor

As Embedded firmware developer my mind is constantly thinking in logical sequences and how multiple processors would execute certain commands and perform certain tasks. If we would monitor processor usage we would see that to perform normal operations (at humans that is considered breathing, walking, eating, etc.) microprocessor is using just small amount of its power to function. If we run a program it takes a RAM or lets say stack footprint. This changes some part of stack once executed, but then only small amount of this stack is really actively changing. It means that some commands are on stack but they are never executed, and that means we would assume that part as inactive, although it contains valuable information in some explicit cases.

Imagine brain as processor

If our brain is processor then we should/must consider it functions in same way with one minor detail: It never looses power or resets. I wrote this in italic for reason, because once in a while we bump in head and our brain actually resets, but I will leave this out. Because our brain never resets in keeps all the stack always on, executing only part of the code on stack while other parts remain inactive for other use cases. This does not mean that it is not used, but I consider it is used for MEMORY. Some of us constantly forget things and that is mainly what I would consider a pointer mess-up. People with photographic memory do not mess up their memory pointers and they can access also distant memories which are stored on this stack. This would probably show bigger part of the brain being used by such people than normal, but again not extremely bigger as they would not change anything on that location, just read from it. So there would be no activity there.

Our abilities are just what we have them

All above leads us to sad conclusion that we will never have telepathic or any other super powers if we would start using the other part of brain, unless there are instructions how to do this stored there. So this is what it becomes interesting. Our brain could have some magical powers stored, but we people cannot read that parts as they are de- fragmented.

Todo:

How do we measure activity of our brain?

When I will find time I will try to answer this question more detail, so this is just for my reference. If you have any useful links/ideas please write me a comment below so that I can finish this article with some straight facts.